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COMMENTARY
Avoiding the clash of
civilizations
By Rabbi Professor
Jonathan Sacks
(Posted with permission of the Foreign Policy
Research Institute)
Religion has
become a decisive force in the contemporary world, and
it is crucial that it be a force for good - for conflict
resolution, not conflict creation. If religion is not
part of the solution, then it will surely be part of the
problem. I would like therefore to put forward a simple
but radical idea. I want to offer a new reading, or,
more precisely, a new listening, to some very ancient
texts. I do so because our situation in the 21st
century, post-September 11, is new, in three ways.
First, religion has returned, counter
intuitively, against all expectation, in many parts of
the world, as a powerful, even shaping, force.
Second, the presence of religion has been
particularly acute in conflict zones such as Bosnia,
Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir and the rest of India and
Pakistan, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, sub-Saharan
Africa, and parts of Asia.
Third, religion is
often at the heart of conflict. It has been said that in
the Balkans, among Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and
Muslims, all three speak the same language and share the
same race; the only thing that divides them is religion.
Religion is often the fault-line along which the
sides divide. The reason for this is simple. Whereas the
20th century was dominated by the politics of ideology,
the 21st century will be dominated by the politics of
identity. The three great Western institutions of
modernity - science, economics, and politics - are more
procedural than substantive, answering questions of
"What?" and "How?" but not "Who?" and "Why?" Therefore
when politics turns from ideology to identity, people
inevitably turn to religion, the great repository of
human wisdom on the questions "Who am I?" and "Of what
narrative am I a part?"
When any system gives
precedence to identity, it does so by defining an "us"
and in contra-distinction to a "them". Identity divides,
whether Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland,
Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, or Muslims and
Hindus in India. In the past, this was a less acute
issue, because for most of history, most people lived in
fairly constant proximity to people with whom they
shared an identity, a faith, a way of life. Today,
whether through travel, television, the Internet, or the
sheer diversity of our multi-ethnic and multi-faith
societies, we live in the conscious presence of
difference. Societies that have lived with this
difference for a long time have learned to cope with it,
but for societies for whom this is new, it presents
great difficulty.
This would not necessarily be
problematic. After the great wars of religion that came
in the wake of the Reformation, this was resolved in
Europe in the 17th century by the fact that diverse
religious populations were subject to overarching state
governments with the power to contain conflict. It was
then that nation-states arose, along with the somewhat
different approaches of Britain and America: John Locke
and the doctrine of toleration, and Thomas Jefferson and
the separation of church and state. The British and
American ways of resolving conflict were different but
both effective at permitting a plurality of religious
groups to live together within a state of civil peace.
What has changed today is the sheer capacity of
relatively small, subnational groups - through global
communications, porous national borders, and the sheer
power of weapons of mass destruction - to create havoc
and disruption on a large scale. In the 21st century we
obviously need physical defense against terror, but also
a new religious paradigm equal to the challenge of
living in the conscious presence of difference. What
might that paradigm be?
In the dawn of
civilization, the first human response to difference was
tribalism: my tribe against yours, my nation against
yours, my god against yours. In this pre- monotheistic
world, gods were local. They belonged to a particular
place and had "local jurisdiction," watching over the
destinies of particular people. So the Mesopotamians had
Marduk and the Moabites Chamosh, the Egyptians their
pantheon and the ancient Greeks theirs. The tribal,
polytheistic world was a world of conflict and war. In
some respects that world lasted in Europe until 1914,
under the name of nationalism. In 1914 young men -
Rupert Brooke and First World War poets throughout
Europe - were actually eager to go to war, restless for
it, before they saw carnage on a massive scale. It took
two world wars and 100 million deaths to cure us of that
temptation.
However, for almost 2,500 years, in
Western civilization, there was an alternative to
tribalism, offered by one of the great philosophers of
all time: Plato. I am going to call this universalism.
My thesis will be that universalism is also inadequate
to our human condition. What Plato argued in The
Republic is that this world of the senses, of things we
can see and hear and feel, the world of particular
things, isn't the source of knowledge or truth or
reality. How is one to understand what a tree is, if
trees are always changing from day to day and there are
so many different kinds of them? How can one define a
table if tables come in all shapes and sizes - big,
small, old, new, wood, other materials? How does one
understand reality in this world of messy particulars?
Plato said that all these particulars are just shadows
on a wall. What is real is the world of forms and ideas:
the idea of a table, the form of a tree. Those are the
things that are universal. Truth is the move from
particularity to universality. Truth is the same for
everyone, everywhere, at all times. Whatever is local,
particular, and unique is insubstantial, even illusory.
This is a dangerous idea, because it suggests
that all differences lead to tribalism and then to war,
and that the best alternative therefore is to eliminate
differences and impose on the world a single, universal
truth. If this is true, then when you and I disagree, if
I am right, you are wrong. If I care about truth, I must
convert you from your error. If I can't convert you,
maybe I can conquer you. And if I can't conquer you,
then maybe I have to kill you, in the name of that
truth. From this flows the blood of human sacrifice
through the ages.
September 11 happened when two
universal civilizations - global capitalism and medieval
Islam - met and clashed. When universal civilizations
meet and clash, the world shakes and lives are lost. Is
there an alternative, not only to tribalism, which we
all know is a danger, but also to universalism?
Let us read the Bible again and hear in it a
message that is both simple and profound, and, I
believe, an important one for our time. We will start
with what the Bible is about: one man, Abraham, and one
woman, Sarah, who have children and become a family and
then in turn a tribe, a collection of tribes, a nation,
a particular people, and a people of the covenant.
What is striking is that the Bible doesn't begin
with that story. For the first eleven chapters, it tells
the universal story of humanity: Adam and Eve, Cain and
Abel, Noah and the flood, Babel and the builders,
universal archetypes living in a global culture. In the
opening words of Genesis 11: "The whole world was of one
language and shared speech." Then, in Genesis 12, God's
call to Abraham, the Bible moves to the particular. This
exactly inverts Plato's order. Plato begins with the
particular and then aspires to the universal. The Bible
begins with the universal and then aspires to the
particular. That is the opposite direction. It makes the
Bible the great counter-Platonic narrative in Western
civilization.
The Bible begins with two
universal, fundamental statements. First, in Genesis 1,
"Let us make man in our image, in our likeness." In the
ancient world it was not unknown for human beings to be
in the image of God: that's what Mesopotamian kings and
the Egyptian pharaoh were. The Bible was revolutionary
for saying that every human being is in the image of
God.
The second epic statement is in Genesis 9,
the covenant with Noah, the first covenant with all
mankind, the first statement in which God asks all
humanity to construct societies based on the rule of
law, the sovereignty of justice and the non-negotiable
dignity of human life.
It is surely those two
passages that inspire the words "We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights. . . ." The irony is that these
truths are anything but self-evident. Plato or Aristotle
wouldn't know what the words meant. Plato believed
profoundly that human beings are created unequal, and
Aristotle believed that some people are born to be free,
other to be slaves.
These words are self-evident
only in a culture saturated in the universal vision of
the Bible. However, that vision is only the foundation.
From then on, starting with Babel and the confusion of
languages and God's call to Abraham, the Bible moves
from the universal to the particular, from all mankind
to one family. The Hebrew Bible is the first document in
civilization to proclaim monotheism, that God is not
only the God of this people and that place but of all
people and every place. Why then does the Bible deliver
an anti-Platonic, particularistic message from Genesis
12 onwards? The paradox is that the God of Abraham is
the God of all mankind, but the faith of Abraham is not
the faith of all mankind.
In the Bible you don't
have to be Jewish to be a man or woman of God.
Melchizedek, Abraham's contemporary, was not a member of
the covenantal family, but the Bible calls him "a priest
of God Most High". Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, a
Midianite, gives Israel its first system of governance.
And one of the most courageous heroines of the Exodus -
the one who gives Moses his name and rescues him - is an
Egyptian princess. We call her Batya or Bithiah, the
Daughter of God.
Melchizedek, Jethro, and
Pharaoh's daughter are not part of the Abrahamic
covenant, yet God is with them and they are with God. As
the rabbis put it two thousand years ago, "The righteous
of every faith, of every nation, have a share in the
world to come." Why, if God is the God of all humanity,
is there not one faith, one truth, one way for all
humanity?
My reading is this: that after the
collapse of Babel, the first global project, God calls
on one person, Abraham, one woman, Sarah, and says "Be
different." In fact, the word "holy" in the Hebrew
Bible, kadosh, actually means "different, distinctive,
set apart." Why did God tell Abraham and Sarah to be
different? To teach all of us the dignity of difference.
That God is to be found in someone who is different from
us. As the great rabbis observed some 1,800 years ago,
when a human being makes many coins in the same mint,
they all come out the same. God makes every human being
in the same mint, in the same image, his own, and yet we
all come out differently. The religious challenge is to
find God's image in someone who is not in our image, in
someone whose color is different, whose culture is
different, who speaks a different language, tells a
different story, and worships God in a different way.
This is a paradigm shift in understanding
monotheism. And we are in a position to hear this
message in a way that perhaps previous generations were
not. Because we have now acquired a general
understanding of the world that is significantly
different from our ancestors'. I will give just two
instances of this among many: one from the world of
natural science and one from economics.
The
first is from biology. There was a time in the European
Enlightenment when it was thought that all of nature was
one giant machine with many interlocking parts, all
harmonized in the service of mankind. We now know that
nature is quite different, that its real miracle is its
diversity. Nature is a complex ecology in which every
animal, plant, bird, every single species has its own
part to play and the whole has its own independent
integrity.
We know even more than this thanks to
the discovery of DNA and our decoding of the genome.
Science writer Matt Ridley points out that the
three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in
every creature. "CGA means arginine, GCG means alanine,
in bats, in beetles, in bacteria. Wherever you go in the
world, whatever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at,
if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know
the same code. All life is one." The genetic code, bar a
few tiny local aberrations, is the same in every
creature. We all use exactly the same language. This
means that there was only one creation, one single event
when life was born. This is what the Bible is hinting
at. The real miracle of this created world is not the
Platonic form of the leaf, it's the 250,000 different
kinds of leaf there are. It's not the idea of a bird,
but the 9,000 species that exist. It is not a universal
language, it is the 6,000 languages actually spoken. The
miracle is that unity creates diversity, that unity up
there creates diversity down here.
One can look
at the same phenomenon from the perspective of
economics. We are all different, and each of us has
certain skills and lacks others. What I lack, you have,
and what you lack, I have. Because we are all different
we specialize, we trade, and we all gain. The economist
David Ricardo put forward a fascinating proposition, the
Law of Comparative Advantage, in the early 19th century.
This says that if you are better at making axe heads
than fishing, and I am better at fishing than making axe
heads, we gain by trade even if you're better than me at
both fishing and making axe heads. You can be better
than me at everything, and yet we still both benefit if
you specialize at what you're best at and I specialize
at what I'm best at. The law of comparative advantage
tells us that every one of us has something unique to
contribute, and by contributing we benefit not only
ourselves but other people as well.
In the
market economy throughout all of history, differences
between cultures and nations have led to one of two
possible consequences. When different nations meet, they
either make war or they trade. The difference is that
from war at the very least one side loses, and in the
long run, both sides lose. From trade, both sides gain.
When we value difference the way the market values
difference, we create a non-zero sum scenario of human
interaction. We turn the narrative of tragedy, of war,
into a script of hope.
So whether we look at
biology or economics, difference is the precondition of
the complex ecology in which we live. And by turning to
the Bible we arrive at a new paradigm, one that is
neither universalism nor tribalism, but a third option,
which I call the dignity of difference. This option
values our shared humanity as the image of God, and
creates that shared humanity in terms like the American
Declaration of Independence or the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. But it also values our
differences, just as loving parents love all their
children not for what makes them the same but for what
makes each of them unique. That is what the Bible means
when it calls God a parent.
This religious
paradigm can be mapped onto the political map of the
21st century. With the end of the Cold War, there were
two famous scenarios about where the world would go:
Francis Fukuyama's End of History (1989) and Samuel
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order (1996).
Fukuyama envisaged an
eventual, gradual spread first of global capitalism,
then of liberal democracy, with the result being a new
universalism, a single culture that would embrace the
world.
Huntington saw something quite different.
He saw that modernization did not mean Westernization,
that the spread of global capitalism would run up
against counter movements, the resurgence of older and
deeper loyalties, a clash of cultures, or what he called
civilizations - in short, a new tribalism.
And
to a considerable extent, that is where we are. Even as
the global economy binds us ever more closely together,
spreading a universal culture across the world - what
Benjamin Barber calls "McWorld" - civilizations and
religious differences are forcing us ever more angrily
and dangerously apart. That is what you get when the
only two scenarios you have are tribalism and
universalism.
There is no instant solution, but
there is a responsibility that rests with us all,
particularly with religious leaders, to envision a
different and more gracious future. As noted earlier,
faced with intense religious conflict and persecution,
John Locke and Thomas Jefferson devised their particular
versions of how different religious groups might live
together peaceably. These two leaps of the imagination
provided, each in their own way, bridges over the abyss
of confrontation across which future generations could
walk to a better world.
I have gone rather
further than Locke's doctrine of toleration or the
American doctrine of separation of church and state
because these no longer suffice for a situation of
global conflict without global governance. I have made
my case on secular grounds, but note that the secular
terms of today - pluralism, liberalism - will never
persuade a deeply passionate, indeed fanatically
passionate religious believer to subscribe to them,
because they are secular ideas. I have therefore given a
religious idea, based on the story of Abraham, from
which all three great monotheisms - Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam - descend. A message of the
dignity of difference can be found that is religious and
profoundly healing. That is the real miracle of
monotheism: not that there is one God and therefore one
truth, one faith, one way, but that unity above creates
diversity here on earth.
Nothing has proved
harder in civilization than seeing God or good or
dignity in those unlike ourselves. There are surely many
ways of arriving at that generosity of spirit, and each
faith may need to find its own way. I propose that the
truth at the heart of monotheism is that God is greater
than religion, that he is only partially comprehended by
any one faith. He is my God, but he is also your God.
That is not to say that there are many gods: that is
polytheism. And it is not to say that God endorses every
act done in his name: a God of yours and mine must be a
God of justice standing above both of us, teaching us to
make space for one another, to hear one another's
claims, and to resolve them equitably. Only such a God
would be truly transcendent. Only such a God could teach
mankind to make peace other than by conquest or
conversion and as something nobler than practical
necessity.
What would such a faith be like? It
would be like being secure in my own home and yet moved
by the beauty of a foreign place knowing that while it
is not my home, it is still part of the glory of the
world that is ours. It would be knowing that we are
sentences in the story of our people but that there are
other stories, each written by God out of the letters of
lives bound together in community. Those who are
confident of their faith are not threatened but enlarged
by the different faiths of others. In the midst of our
multiple insecurities, we need now the confidence to
recognize the irreducible, glorious dignity of
difference.
Rabbi Sacks is Chief Rabbi
of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British
Commonwealth
Posted with permission of the
Foreign
Policy Research Institute
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